In today's society, the telephone is a common instrument. People use telephones to communicate in many different environments. Indeed, the telephone is nearly omnipresent and used by millions of people. Even public locations typically have a pay telephone within easy walking distance to provide access to the public switched telephone network.
However, providing land-line based telephone service to certain remote locations is not economically feasible. The cost of installing a pay telephone includes running a line, setting up a local switch, and installing the actual pay telephone. Sometimes these costs drastically exceed the potential revenues of the pay telephone. Typically, the provider of a pay telephone receives only a nominal fee for each call placed from the pay telephone. If the installation of a pay telephone is not economically feasible, then there is no incentive to provide pay telephone service at the remote location.
Current solutions to this problem remain unsatisfactory. Cellular technology suffers from problems similar to land-line based telephony. The cost of erecting cellular transmission towers may also be too expensive to justify providing service. Microwave connections require sophisticated, specialized equipment. This leaves service providers with no options for extending coverage to all those who desire pay telephone service.
For example, providing telephone service to an oil derrick at sea may be economically prohibitive. The derrick would not only require a telephone but a transmission path to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The number of telephone calls placed from the derrick using traditional billing methods would never generate enough revenue to pay for the cost of providing the pay telephone service in this example. Other remote locations suffer similar problems. These problems persist in any environment where significant expenditures are required to provide service.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an economically feasible method to provide pay telephone service to even the most isolated locations. There is a further need in the art for a system which allows a service provider to recoup the costs of providing access to a public switched telephone network via a pay telephone.